News giants like CNN and the BBC have definitely changed the news cycle. Back in my day, the newspaper was the main source of what's happening and if you want to know the prevailing opinion regarding certain issues. There were only two cycles then, the morning and the evening edition. Now it has become a 24 hour cycle. At home, I watch CNN and during the day the news comes from Asia and later in the afternoon, from Europe, Africa and the Middle East and at night time, the Americas, (US, Mexico, South America). Obviously if you're a news junkie you wouldn't have enough sleep with all the information that keeps popping up every second. Now more people are turning to online news websites and blogs and twitter to keep updated.
With these developments come concern about the influence the media plays in all our affairs and how the major shift from reading the morning paper to live breaking news every hour is changing some habits in how people use that information.
Last week, Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput gave a talk to Legatus, an organization of Catholic business leaders and he talked about "Catholics, and The Fourth Estate." The term 'fourth estate' was coined during revolutionary times in France where the three main pillars of society were the clergy, the nobles and the common people. They were referred to as the 'three estates' of French society. The 'fourth estate' refers to the press. Thus the talk centers around the power of the written word and the need of Catholics everywhere to understand how the media works and how they work on us.
Here in the Philippines, the media enjoys a lot of freedom and wields a tremendous influence in our society. It has the power to effect change and the power to shape public opinion. The Archbishop, though he refers mainly to mainstream media in the US, the whole sense of his talk also applies everywhere the media has a powerful influence. He explained, "Most of what we know about the world comes from people we'll never meet and don't really understand, We don't even think of them as individuals. Instead we usually talk about them in the collective -- as 'the media' or 'the press.'
"Yet behind every Los Angeles Times editorial or Fox News broadcast are human beings with personal opinions and prejudices. These people select and frame the news. And when we read their newspaper articles or tune in their TV shows, we engage them in a kind of intellectual intimacy in the same way you're listening to me right now."
He also observed and this really surprised me, that most of us usually do not know the people writing the editorial to a newspaper and those who produce tonight's news broadcast and that is is worth talking about because 'the people who shape our information control the public conversation.'
When I was a Mass Communication student my professor defined news as, 'anything the editor thinks is news.' Now, I am beginning to understand what that means because today I am noticing that most of the people's opinions almost always comes from what they read in the paper or what they watched on TV. Gone are the days of reading the newspaper in the morning. Now, one has only to open a browser and read the news there or perhaps watch a video stream of a news report that was posted a few minutes earlier. There is a huge difference between the old and the new. The Archbishop in his astute observation said that during the book and newspaper days, there was a lot of time devoted to critical thinking and analyzing. Now everything is kept short, brief and sensational and this he says is dangerous.
The Archbishop has really made a lot of good points on this so I encourage you to read the article here to read more of his thoughts during that talk.
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